SMILE please it will do wonders for you :-)

Smiling will make you stand out in a crowd and at the same time it will help your body to function better. So, smile to improve your health, reduce your stress levels, and enhance your attractiveness. Smiling is just one great way to live to the full and live longer.

Smiling Makes Us Appear More Attractive

We want to know a smiling person and understand what makes them feel so good. Therefore, here is an attraction factor and we are drawn to people who smile. .Frowns, scowls and grimaces all push people away but a smile draws them in so keep your smile looking great.
Smile to Change your Mood

Next time you are feeling low, try putting a smile on your face. Smiling will trick the mind into helping to change your mood for the better. 

Smiling Is Infectious

Lighten up the room by smiling and change the moods of others, make them happier. A smiling person brings happiness with them. So invest your smile you will reap dividends. 
Smiling Reduces and Relieves Stress

Stress shows in our faces. Smiling helps to prevent us from looking tired, worn down, and overwhelmed. When you are stressed, take time to put on a smile. Reducing your stress will enable you to take action.

Smiling Boosts Your Immune System

Smiling really does helps the immune system to work better. When you smile and relax the immune function improves and you may just prevent such things as the flu and colds by smiling.
Read Norman Cousins "The Anatomy of an Illness"

Smiling Lowers Your Blood Pressure

Smiling causes a measurable reduction in your blood pressure. Why not prove it for yourself if you have a blood pressure monitor at home. Take a reading and then smile for a minute or two and take another reading while still smiling. Check out the difference?

Smiling Releases Endorphin, Natural Pain Killers and Serotonin

Smiling is a free and natural drug.Studies show that smiling releases endorphins, natural pain killers, and serotonin. Together these three make us feel good. 

Smiling Lifts the Face and Makes You Look Younger

Smile it takes seventy two muscles to frown and only fourteen to smile so the muscles you use to smile lift the face, and make you appear younger. No need for an expensive face lift, just try smile your way through the day, you'll look younger and feel better.

and finally a little poem, author unknown:

The Value of a Smile

Smiling is infectious

You catch it like the flu

When someone smiled at me today

I started smiling too

I walked around a corner

And someone saw my grin

When he smiled too I realized

I’d passed it on to him

I thought about this smile of mine

And realized what its worth

A single smile begun by me

Could travel round the earth!

So if you feel your smile begin

Don’t leave it undetected 

Let’s start an epidemic now

And get the world infected

Failure????

No one is ever a failure

 - There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.

Tony Robbin

Thanks to Bernardo Moya - CEO, The Best You Can Be  for these insights

Three Ways To Turn Failure into Success - Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill made a study of the world's most successful people. Something he noticed was they never experienced "Failure". If something didn't work for them, they learned from the experience and moved on. "Failure" was never the end of the process, but a step towards success. 

Here are three common attitudes of successful people to failure: 

1) Failure is a blessing when it pushes us out of a cushioned seat of self-satisfaction and forces us to do something useful. 

Study your own life and the achievers you admire and you will discover great opportunities often occurred during adversity. When faced with failure, we are more willing to deal with radical change and take the risks that lead to great success.  You can capitalize on the opportunities adversity brings. 

2) Failure seems to be nature's plan for preparing us for great responsibilities. 

If everything in life were easy and came out exactly as planned, how little we would learn, how boring life would be, and how arrogant we would become! Failure allows us to develop humility. Failure is not easy to accept philosophically, knowing it is one of life's great learning experiences. But remember, that's what it is. Be certain that when you are being most extremely tested, you are being prepared for great achievement. 

3) Your failure may prove to be an asset, provided you know why you failed. 

Insight can result from spectacular failure. At the moment of truth, extract the useful lessons you can use and then put the episode behind you. Learn from your failures, forget about them, and move on to do better things. 

Personally, I see failure as the doorstep to success. It's an opportunity to learn and go further in the direction you want. In that way, it isn't really failure at all, it's a learning experience - or as Dr Richard Bandler puts it - it's feedback. 

Remember, failure isn't an endpoint. You dust yourself off, learn from it, and go for it. That's the secret of the most successful people! 
 

A to Z of making work more fun

A – Z of Making Work Fun         J

A         A look at http://www.laughterremedy.com/articles/25_ideas.html may cause a laugh J

B         Bring cake and cookies for birthdays

C         Cartoons and clipart – have them on the office walls

D         Dilbert books show us what not to do!

E          Energize your team each morning

F          Fish – have them hanging around

G         Golf with work buddies

H         Have a dress down day           

I           involve everyone in your projects.

J          Juggle with your colleagues

K         Keep smiling it takes 78 muscles to frown and only 14 to smile

L          Laughter the best medicine

M        Make meetings magical – open them with a trick

N         Name days – draw names from a hat to see who organizes the fun events

O         Organize office outings

P          Photos and pictures brighten up your office

Q         Quiz time – general knowledge & work related

R         Remember to thank and congratulate good performance

S          Search the web – “Fun at Work”

T          Team up (Together Everyone Achieves More)

U         Up tempo – keep up the pace

V         Viva voce – talk to people whenever you can don’t send e-mails!

W        Welcome newcomers and strangers to your office

X         Xanadu – an imaginary wonderful place – make yours’ real!

Y          Yin & Yang – contrast them and maximize on both

Z          Zwitterion – (look it up in the Oxford Dictionary) make your group positively charged

VW Beetle and persuasion

Thanks to Bernardo Moya CEO, The Best You Can Be for the following:

What a Volkswagen Beetle Tells Us About Persuasion

The specialist on persuasion, Robert Cialdini PhD, relates a fascinating account of how advertisers turned the perception of the Volkswagen Beetle on its head when it was launched in the US.

The marketers had a challenge to overcome. The cute little "bug" was considered something of a laughing stock in comparison to larger and more stylish American cars of the time.

Rather than ignore the public view of the car and focus on fuel consumption or durability, somehow, the advertisers managed to turn the VW's perceived ugliness into a strength.

Their advertising slogans included:

"Ugly is only skin deep"

and 

"It will stay uglier, longer."

These negative motifs at first appear to be suicide for sales. Yet somehow, this managed to grab the attention so that when the advertisers talked about the reduced fuel consumption and the car's other strengths, people were willing to listen. So, what was at the heart of the success?

The answer is in the perceived honesty of the sellers. By coming straight out with telling the public something that was not necessarily the car's greatest selling point, people learned to trust the advertisers. So, when they told them about all its upsides - its fuel economy, its easy handling, its cheapness - then these factors were taken on board and accepted, too.

The car's makers and sellers were perceived as reliable and honest, because they didn't make bones about the downsides.

Other advertising campaigns have used the same approach. For example, one of Listerine's slogans was: "Listerine: The taste you hate three times a day".

The fact is, people respect honesty. That's why going to the trouble of pointing out a minor drawback with a problem early on will make your buyer trust you. And when you are selling yourself, a little bit of honesty in which you acknowledge minor negative reference. 

As Robert Cialdini comments:

"Additionally, anyone who is considering a career change may be interested to learn that a recruitment study found that applicants whose curriculum vitae contained only wholly positive references were invited to fewer interviews than those whose curriculum vitae first highlighted a weakness or slight limitation before going on to describe positive characteristics."

Of course, as Cialdini also says, you need to get the level of trust-winning honesty right. You don't see advertising campaigns such as: "Ranked last in its class by J D Power and Associates, but once we get these wrongful death suits taken care of, we'll try harder."

So think about it. How can you disarm the critics beforehand, and win people over, at a job interview, in a sale or in an negotiation. And how do you turn your negative into a winning positive?

see Richard Bandler live in London  goo to www.learning-linx for more information

Leadership through relationships

In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions. 
- Margaret Wheatly Leadership and the New Science


Isn't this so true, when you have great relationships with people you work with, often times you just work together for the common good. Vision, missions, objectives, goals just seem to be easily achieved